Orthographic error monitoring in old age: Lexical and sublexical availability during perception and production.

Previous research suggests that older adults suffer declines in producing accurate spellings but retain the ability to accurately detect misspellings. The preservation of perception in the face of impaired production has been used to support a model of aging in which age impairs access to linguistic representations under specific circumstances, while representations themselves remain intact. The current research tests two predictions of this Transmission Deficit Hypothesis (TDH): first, that the differential effect of age on perception and production occurs when tasks are equated on response requirements and underlying representations, and second, that both word and spelling frequency interact to determine the effect of age on performance. Results of two error monitoring tasks supported the predictions of the TDH, demonstrating age-related production impairments that interacted with both word and spelling frequency, but no impairment of older adults' spelling perception, even for low frequency words or spellings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The reliability, validity, and design of the Defining Issues Test.

Administered the Defining Issues Test (J. R. Rest, 1974, 1975) to 365 Ss in 3 age groups: junior high, high school, and college. Each scale score discriminated significantly among age groups, as did the Principled Reasoning (P) score. The validity of the P-score with respect to age group was estimated to be .48, and its reliability was estimated to be .70. The design of the test is criticized on the grounds that (a) some stages have many more items associated with them than do other stages (hence, scale scores are not comparable with one another); (b) different dilemmas have different numbers of items from a given stage; (c) there is a significant order artifact for Stage 3 and Stage 4 items; and (d) this order effect interacts with age. Finally, there was evidence in 3 of 6 dilemmas that an S's decision was correlated with his stage of reasoning. It is suggested that the relation of stage to age could be clarified if the design of the test were changed to eliminate the possible effects of decision. (16 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Development of categorization and reasoning in the natural world: Novices to experts, naive similarity to ecological knowledge.

Two experiments investigate the role of similarity and causal-ecological knowledge in expert and novice categorization and reasoning. In Experiment 1, university undergraduates and commercial fishermen sorted marine creatures into groups; although there was substantial agreement, novices sorted largely on the basis of appearance, whereas experts often cited commercial, ecological, or behavioral factors, and systematically subdivided fish on the basis of ecological niche. In Experiment 2, experts and novices were asked to generalize a blank property or novel disease from a pair of marine creatures. Novices relied on similarity to guide generalizations. Experts used similarity to reason about blank properties but ecological relations to reason about diseases. Expertise appears to involve knowledge of multiple relations among entities and context-sensitive application of those relations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Judging creativity: A method for assessing how and by what criteria it is done.

In 2 experiments with a total of 90 undergraduates, Ss evaluated fictitious protocols that varied in the number and uniqueness of the answers. In Exp I, Ss were instructed to use criteria for creativity; in Exp II, judgments were made according to creativity, intelligence, or gender. Productivity influenced the ratings under all 3 criteria with the largest effect being on intelligence, followed by creativity. Uniqueness had an independent influence on judgments of creativity, a borderline effect on intelligence, and no significant effect on gender. Protocols which had more answers were judged more "masculine." Results indicate that laymen share the same definition of creativity used by psychometricians and that intelligence is semantically different from creativity. It is concluded that the method offers an unobtrusive but objective way of assessing factors that enter into conceptual judgments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Using response time measures to assess "guilty knowledge".

How can a suspect's guilt or innocence be reliably tested? The validity of the polygraph, which measures changes in physiological arousal during a "guilty knowledge" test, is controversial (e.g., T. R. Bashore & P. E. Rapp, 1993; T. P. Cross & L. Saxe, 1992; D. T. Lykken, 1998; J. P. Rosenfeld, 1995; R. Steinbrook, 1992). One alternative to the polygraph examines event-related potentials recorded during a memory interference task (L. A. Farwell & E. Donchin, 1991). The present study extended this paradigm to determine whether response times (RTs) can accurately identify participants possessing specific guilty knowledge. Results from Experiment I showed that RT alone can reliably discriminate "guilty" from "innocent" participants. Experiments 2a and 2b indicated that an RT-based paradigm is more resistant to strategic manipulation than previously suggested (Farwell & Donchin, 1991). This RT-based paradigm may be a viable alternative to the polygraph for detecting guilty knowledge. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)